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BY REV. SAMUEL T. SPEAR, D. D.,

PASTOR OF THE SOUTH PRESBYTERIAN CHURCH OF BROOKLYN.

THE RETRIBUTIVE POWER OF MEMORY.

"BUT Abraham said, Son, remember that thou in thy lifetime receivedst thy good things, and likewise Lazarus evil things: but now he is comforted, and thou art tormented."- LUKE 16: 25.

WHEN the life that now is shall be past, and that which is to come shall be present, it will be the office of memory to establish and perpetuate the connection of knowledge between these two periods of our conscious being. Without such a connection, the religion of the Bible, considered as expounding the relations between time and eternity, would seem to be a failure. The theory of probation here, followed by judgment and retribution hereafter, in order to be consciously realized in the future life, supposes that we shall be able in that life to return our thoughts to the scene through which we are now passing, reproducing it in the eye of the mind. This we must do, or we could not identify ourselves as the same beings, in the two states; nor could we see the relation between what we are in the one life, and what we have done in the other. Losing sight of this life, we should have no means of interpreting that; we should be unable either to give or receive an account of the deeds done in the body; and hence a system of rewards and punishments in any sense that we could appreciate, would be an impossibility. That memory will therefore exist as a faculty, and its action as a function of the future life, is as certain as the truth of the Bible. This idea is clearly stamped upon the words of the text. The rich man who lifted up his eyes in the world of woe, was told to recur in thought to the facts of his former lifetime. True, his body had died; but his memory was still living and active, fully able to go back to the world he had left, and recall its scenes.

Those, moreover, who believe in the immortality of the soul, whether on the ground of reason, or revelation, or both, must also believe in the immortality of its faculties, especially those that have little or no dependence upon the body, and which can therefore work as well without the body as with it, and perhaps

much better. Reason, memory, and conscience belong to this class of mental powers. We see not in what way death can wield any agency, either to destroy these powers or impair their activity.

Assuming, then, the immortality of the soul, also that of memory in the state of endless activity, and also that our future condition, in the relation of a sequel to a preceding cause is dependent upon our moral conduct in this life, we naturally think of memory, as one of the great agencies, that for weal or woe will be intimately connected with the history of our future being. How shall we be affected by this return of thought to the scenes of an earthly life? To this solemn and deeply interesting question, I propose in the present sermon to seek an answer, using our present knowledge of memory as the medium of asecnding to the sight of things future and eternal.

I. What, then, is Memory? Let us first define the faculty. Every one is aware of the fact, that the knowledge which we have once acquired, the things we have seen and done, the experiences that we have had, though not always present to the mind, are nevertheless so retained, that these same things may be, and often are, recalled to our mental notice. Every one is fully conscious of such a fact in his own history. We designate this fact by the term memory. Memory is therefore the mind's power of preserving and knowing its own past history-resuscitative or reproductive in the sense of bringing the items of that history to present view-recognitive in the sense of connecting those items with ourselves. So far as its action can extend, it makes the acquired possessions of the soul imperishable. This is memory here: it is the kind of mental activity to which we apply the term; and if the faculty be immortal, it will be memory hereafter. A change of worlds will not alter the nature of the power. It is the same in both worlds. We are, moreover, so constructed, that we can not discredit the knowledge given by memory. I am as certain of what I distinctly remember, as I can be of any thing. In its sphere the faculty is an absolute authority. Its testimony must be admitted. Such is its present character; and judging from the present, such will be its future character.

From this definition we see at a glance the immense importance of memory in the constitution of man. Without it he would be nothing as a spiritual being, either here or hereafter. The absolute loss of memory would destroy the whole framework of his mental existence, by limiting his intellectual life to the impressions of the passing moment. He would know nothing of the past, and could rise to no view of the future. IIe could neither love nor hate, hope nor fear. Comparison would be out of the question; reason would be dead, and progress impossible; and, indeed, the whole man would be reduced to a condition

worse than the lowest form of idiocy. There is a vast importance attached to the capacity; its services are of the highest grade; and if this be so here, then, by analogy, we infer that the same will be true bereafter. It will not be less as a power, or less needful, than it was in time. It is now vitally interwoven with our whole temporal destiny; and the presumption of a like importance, a like service, and perhaps much greater, through the ages of our endless being, falls into the ear of reason, not only as a pleasant sound, but as a truth too probable to be questioned, and too significant to be forgotten. Observing what the faculty now does, how it traverses the silent chambers of the past, preserving our knowledge, and diffusing light, and life, health and force through the complicated energies of our mental nature, we are lost in the contemplation of what it will do, when the hindrances of flesh and blood are gone, and the ever-increasing ages of the past shall be the field of its endless action. Immortality expands our ideas of memory to an estimate that is almost infinite.

II. Let me say, as a second item of thought, that memory operates in obedience to established and permanent LAWS. No one can have failed to see, at least in a general sense, that our ideas are in some way so connected together that they are mutually suggestive of each other, and hence proceed in companies or regular trains. The object present to the eye of thought brings up one that is absent, in virtue of some relation between the two; and thus we advance from thought to thought with the utmost celerity, precision, and certainty of movement. Take, for example, a common conversation in which a dozen persons may be sharers: see how their thoughts fly in all directions, moving hither and thither, marking an indefinite number of points, leaping over immense intervals of time, marching.in and marching out with a rapidity that entirely escapes their own notice, sometimes apparently without any connection. The remark of one starts a train of ideas in the mind of another, who, in his turn, sets another mind in motion. Thus they go on, it may be for hours, simply thinking and talking, calling up millions upon millions of memories. And now if you had an eye sufficiently detective and comprehensive to explore this whole scene, you would see that, without hesitation, uncertainty, or confusion, every mind in this group has moved from object to object in the most perfect obedience to law. Not a thought has been present, or a word spoken, out of all connection with some other thought or word. Every thing was in its place according to a fixed mental order-not a moment too soon, or a moment too late.

"Lulled in the countless chambers of the brain

Our thoughts are linked by many a hidden chain:
Awake but one, and lo! what myriads rise!

Each stamps its image as the other flies."

Let me illustrate one or two of these hidden chains to which the poet refers. It is a well-ascertained fact of experience, that if two objects resemble each other, either in themselves, or in their effects upon our feelings, one being absent and the other present, the latter has the power to recall the former. Thus, according to this law of similars, you see a portrait, and you instantly think of the person whom it represents. You meet a man whom you never saw before, passing him without saying a word; and that man suggests to you an absent friend, perhaps long since dead, owing to some resemblance, perhaps very slight, between the two persons. Millions of ideas are daily crossing our intellectual heavens under the operation of this law. So also ideas that stand to each other in the relation of contrariety or contrast are mutually suggestive, according to the law of opposites. Vice will hence suggest virtue; and wealth, poverty. Kings and beggars are thus related. The thoughts expressed by the terms high and low, great and small, bond and free, wise and ignorant, are linked together by the relation of contrast. The one being present, the opposite thought will instantly make its appearance. The charms of antithesis and the power of wit depend upon this kind of association. Then, again, things that have been contemplated together in either time or place, are for this reason so connected that they are suggestive of each other; and this general fact is called the law of proximity or nearness. Your mind fastens upon a particular point in time past, or a particular place visited by you in other days; and what a multitude of objects connected with that time or place will at once rush into the field of vision! Having been once thought of together, they remain together in your after-history, being in this form laid up in the folds of memory. Thus the man of three-score years and ten has no sooner fixed his mind upon some item of his childhood, than a whole army of other items passes under his review. He can talk for hours together, reproducing with great vividness the by-gone scenes of early life, separated from them in time, but not in thought. Still further, things that hold to each other the relation of dependence expressed by the terms cause and effect, have the same power of mutual suggestion. If you think of the French revolution, you will naturally dwell upon the causes which led to it, perhaps recalling the men who were its chief agents. The mention of a disease will suggest to you some friend who died with that disease. Thus our thoughts, by a fixed order of nature, move from cause to effect, and effect to cause

Such, then, are the hidden chains or laws of mental association, by which our thoughts are linked together, and hence have the power of rescuing each other from the grave of oblivion. By them we conduct the process of memory. We do it without labor, yea, by necessity, having no power not to do it. We can

neither change the laws, nor refuse to accept the results of their action. The truth is, we must remember; we must converse with the past.

These laws represent no outward force, no determining necessity existing in the objects of thought. They are strictly subjective, inherent in the mind itself, being the established forms of its action, the divinely appointed methods in which it retains and brings forth its knowledge, and hence living in the mind as a portion of the furniture of intelligence. By a force wholly within itself, by a necessary energy in its own nature, alike inscrutable and irresistible, the mind makes the connection, in virtue of which our thoughts reproduce and follow each other in regular trains. It is so constructed by its great Author, that it must think in this way. And if such be its present constitution, if the laws of memory be inherent in the very nature of man's soul, if our intellectual reproduction and recognition of the past be thus an absolute necessity in the present life, think you that a transfer of the mind to other scenes will be the end of these facts? Exactly the opposite is the probability to be gathered, from what we now know of man. The fundamental principles of spiritual activity must go with the mind wherever it goes; they enter into its very definition as part and parcel of its being; and we hence infer that they will exist hereafter as really as they do here, doubtless very much intensified in their power of action. Reason thus carries her conception of memory into the immortal future. Exploring the man that now is, she forms an idea of the man that will be. Following him across the event of death, and lifting her pinions to the sublime elevation of eternity, she sees the same essential laws of intellectual life acting there that were so active here. In this way we obtain one clew to the future, ascending from the known elements of our present being to those that will enter into our future and endless being. Thus we think of ourselves as intelligent in both worlds, conscious in both, voluntary in both, in both exercising memory according to fixed laws, some of which at least rule our present life. Our mental access to things eternal is gained by that which we know in time. Our primary notions of ourselves as existing hereafter must be gathered from ourselves as existing here. By no other method can we form even the faintest idea of our future state.

III. Having thus defined memory, and briefly explained its laws, I wish to call your attention, in the third place, to the EXTENT of its retentive and reproductive power. In the amazing greatness of this power, as we observe it in time, we shall perhaps find the condition of at least conjecturing what it will be in eternity. It was the opinion of Lord Bacon that nothing in one's antecedent history is ever irrecoverably forgotten. Cole

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